CV NEWS FEED // This is “bad news for the trans movement.” Or is it?
A Washington Post poll released last Friday showed that “clear majorities” of Americans oppose policies and positions pushed by “trans” activists, across the board.
Political scientist Richard Hanania, director of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI), tweeted the poll’s results saying it didn’t bode well for promoters of gender ideology.
Of all adults surveyed, 57% stated that “whether someone is a man or a woman is determined by the sex they were assigned at birth.” By contrast, 43% held the “trans” activist view that “someone can be a man or a woman even if that is different from the sex they were assigned at birth.”
A majority of all age cohorts were found to believe that a man cannot become a woman, or vice-versa. Among the youngest category, 18 to 34, 53% believed that sex remains the same from birth. This is only four percent lower than respondents over the age of 65.
The age group the Washington Post determined was most likely to believe that a person’s sex as determined at birth cannot be changed is the 55 to 64 category, with 63% taking the position. Respondents age 45 to 54 were the second most likely to agree, polling at 59%.
Regarding “trans” policies, 68% of respondents opposed subjecting children ages 10 to 14 to puberty blockers. A slightly smaller but still healthy majority of 58% opposed hormonal “gender-affirming care” for minors between the ages of 15 and 17.
The debate over men like Lia Thomas competing in women’s sports was also the focus of a few questions in the Washington Post poll. Sixty-six percent of respondents opposed males competing in girls’ high school sports, 65% for women’s college and professional sports, and 62% for girls’ youth sports.
Finally, the poll found that an overwhelming majority of Americans support the premise of state laws like Florida’s popular 2022 Parental Rights in Education Act.
Seventy-seven percent of respondents thought that it was “inappropriate to discuss trans identity in public schools with students” from kindergarten through the third grade – the same grades covered under the Florida statute. Seventy percent of respondents further believed that “trans identity” should not be discussed in fourth- or fifth-grade classrooms, and a slim majority of 52% deemed this topic inappropriate for middle school students.
However, many of the replies to Hanania’s tweet were less optimistic about the poll’s results.
One Twitter user stated that the poll was, on the contrary, “great news” for “trans” activists. “Compare all of those numbers to 20 years ago and it’s an utterly shocking difference,” the user explained. “The LGBT propaganda effort is massive and effective.”
Another reply struck a similar tone. “Bad news for the trans movement that almost half of the public thinks that people can choose their sex? More like bad news for rational thought and scientific progress, and good news for misguided social engineering.”
